Heroes, Villains, and the Thrill of Professional Selling: Your Guide to Directing a Winning Buying Experience

By Adrian Davis

When thinking of sales, it’s easy to pick out the heroes and the villains, but Adrian Davis is here to spell it out in detail. With relatable analogies of comparing sales to cinematic superhero tropes, Heroes, Villains, and the Thrill of Professional Selling explains how to find success in every story in the marketplace. Rooted in SAMA and the concept of “Co-Creating Value” this book describes an approach to creating value that draws upon an ideal from the movie industry and is imperative for mutual success: Your client is the hero in the story.

Adrian Davis simplifies the hero’s journey with real-life examples, compelling stories, and templates to guide your learning. Movie genres are compared to different client types, and analogies are drawn between the screen and the sales floor to educate the salesperson, or in this case, the director, on creating a positive buying experience for clients. Adding to this insight, Adrian offers a path to develop your SOCKET solution, and a way to engage “inside-outsiders” to help in the journey. Find a robust series of 100 questions to discover value and a stakeholder checklist to guide you through the maze and knowledge on “Co-Creating Value” to garner success.

Whether you prefer action, mystery, romance, sci-fi, comedy, horror, or drama, Adrian’s explanations are sure to make you a sharper salesperson and cinephile as you continue working with your client.

Take Adrian’s advice and don’t come out of the story to editorialize — let the story do the work! You can read his lessons learned, put them into practice, and embark on your own journey for stronger relationships and success.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Advantage Media Group
• Release date: Sep 5, 2023
• ISBN: 9781642255454

Adrian Davis

ADRIAN DAVIS is the President & CEO of Whetstone Inc., a management consulting firm. Companies such as DuPont and Johnson & Johnson have partnered with Adrian to create greater value for their customers. He is a Certified Speaking Professional (CSP), a Certified Professional in Business Process Management (P.BPM) and a Certified Competitive Intelligence Professional (CIP). The author of Human-to-Human Selling, Adrian is an internationally recognized, thought-provoking speaker and trusted advisor to CEOs and sales leaders.

Book preview

Many would say I was a troubled teenager. I guess I was. I certainly lacked focus. School was easy, but it made no sense to me. I didn’t understand the why behind what I was being taught. This frustrated me and led me to becoming a homeless high school dropout. Long story short: while figuring out how to put my life together, I discovered the sales profession … and I loved it! It immediately made sense to me, and for the first time I found meaning in my work. I couldn’t understand why sales was considered dishonorable. I set myself two goals. The first was to learn all I could to become a successful salesperson, and the second was to prove that one could be successful in sales and also honorable.

Looking back on my career now, I feel a deep sense of fulfillment. I never wavered in my objectives, and I have achieved both. This book is one way I feel like I am giving back, hopefully helping others along their journey as I have been helped by others on my journey.

This book was designed as a practical tool for busy business leaders, particularly those who are responsible for revenue-generating sales in their companies. I’ve added a bit of fun by using a movie analogy because, in my experience as a corporate sales trainer, learning is way more effective when it’s entertaining and engaging. Moreover, let me assure you that the comparison between making sales and making movies is remarkably accurate.

First, let’s talk about the name of this book—Heroes, Villains, and the Thrill of Professional Selling: Your Guide to Directing a Winning Buying Experience. I love sales and find it thrilling to help customers solve their problems. I believe our customers—not we—are the heroes. That attitude places customers front and center as we direct the buying experience. And we do direct it with a strategic and deliberate approach. Nothing about sales is random; it requires discipline and purpose. I also believe that there has been an uptick in external forces, or what I call the villains, that are putting businesses in a constant state of uncertainty. Our job in professional selling is to recognize those villains and help our hero-customers thrive in the midst of what are often chaotic forces. We are accompanying them on their hero’s journey, which I’ll address more as we move through the book. As professional salespeople and strategic account managers, we are the directors of their buying experience.

These beliefs make up the core of this book, which is a sequel to my previous book published ten years ago, Human to Human Selling: How to Sell Real and Lasting Value in an Increasingly Digital and Fast-Paced World. I emphasized human to human in my first book because I could see the wave of automation, e-commerce, and artificial intelligence that was encroaching on the world of professional selling. Much has changed in the last ten years, particularly with the two-year pandemic shutdown and its ongoing implications. But what has not changed is that complex and high-value B2B sales and account management is, and will always remain, a human-to-human discipline.

When I originally started writing this book, I focused primarily on storytelling, which has been a fundamental aspect of my work for more than thirty years. I quickly realized that there are lots of books, courses, and webinars on storytelling and sales. Many take the stance that delivering an engaging story to a prospect is the key to sales. The message that good storytelling equals good sales is somewhat simplistic. It’s just not that basic.

Professional selling goes far beyond delivering a good story. It requires creating a winning buying experience that generates referrals and repeat business. It demands collaboration from teams on both the seller and buyer sides. It often requires significant people and financial resources. Each sales opportunity has its own plot, although the story flow may be similar depending on the type of sale and industry. These realizations led me to the belief that professional selling is more similar to moviemaking. Storytelling is an important part of the process, but it’s only part of the equation.

I’ll provide you with a way to look at customer types through the lens of movie genres. Does your potential customer have a culture that seems like an action movie? Are they in need of a little bit of romance? Do you need to help them escape from a horror situation? See, I told you we could have a bit of fun with this analogy, while learning key principles that will flow right to your bottom line.

Throughout this book I use the terms professional salesperson and strategic account manager. This is a deliberate decision to emphasize the professional nature of sales and the critical strategic role of account managers, since both are vital in creating and sustaining a winning buying experience. While professional salespeople are clearly responsible for successfully completing transactions with customers, this is not necessarily the case for strategic account managers. In many organizations the strategic account manager never actually finalizes business transactions. They provide strategic coordination that enables the sales team to close more business. However, they are equally if not even more committed to creating compelling value for their customers.

The thousands of people I’ve trained have found three guides particularly useful in putting this thinking to work, and I’ll be sharing these powerful documents with you:

• The Hero’s Journey: Discovery Storyboard

• The Hero’s Journey: Success Storyboard

• The Hero’s Journey: Action Storyboard

The discovery storyboard is based on structured story listening that’s part of the discovery process. Just like movie directors rely on storyboards to capture the flow and vision of a movie, sales teams can use a storyboard to understand core aspects of the engagement. I’ve created terminology to make the method more memorable and to emphasize key aspects of this very important process:

• The Hero

• The Goal

• The Villain

• The Flaw

• The Pit of Despair

• The Special Resource

• The New World

Next, I’ll show you a proven method you can use to tell a relevant success story to a customer so that it hooks their emotions and facilitates engagement. Finally, I’ll share a simple road map for once the sale is closed in order to produce a successful engagement that leads to repeat business.

Each of these three storyboards can be found online at our academy (https://academy.whetstoneinc.ca). I strongly advise that you print them off and fill in your answers by hand. There is a significant amount of research that indicates that writing on paper instead of typing on a computer slows the brain down for more thoughtful answers that are retained longer.

Finally, I will summarize lessons we can learn from Hollywood. By the end of the book, you will have a fresh outlook on sales. The latest findings from neuroscience will be accessible and practical. Not only will you be able to effectively engage your customers at a deeper emotional level, but you’ll also have a lot more fun. As artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT, Midjourney, and DALL-E 2 threaten to replace transactional selling, the simple approaches that you learn in this book will make you indispensable to your employer and your most important customers. This book is less about techniques and much more about thinking approaches. As customer relationships are increasingly disrupted by artificial intelligence, how you think and how you help your customers to think and make sense of their world will make you more valuable. The future is bright for those who understand that the more the world changes, the more customers will seek higher level partnerships that help them navigate these changes.

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For more extensive tools, classes, coaching, and advisory groups, please join the Whetstone Academy at https://academy.whetstoneinc.ca. You can also contact me directly at https://whetstoneinc.ca/contact-us/ to inquire about speaking engagements and live, instructor-led training.

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Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world.

—Robert McAfee Brown, minister, theologian, activist

Idiscovered the power of storytelling accidentally. I was headhunted by Silicon Valley–based Portal Software to represent them in Canada. This was back in the late 1990s, and the company was an early internet-based business. Its biggest competitor was headquartered in Toronto. I nearly refused the offer because I was concerned that I would be its only professional salesperson in Canada but decided not to miss the opportunity since I knew the internet was going to be big.

Within a month of joining, I was flown out to California for a sales conference where I met my peers from around the world. At that point I had no customers or success stories of my own and intuitively understood that I needed success stories, or I would fail. Failure was never, and has never been, an option for me. So, I asked my peers one question: Where have you been successful? As they told me their stories, I jotted a summary on blank sheets at the back of my FranklinCovey planner. By the end of the conference, I had about thirty stories to use with potential customers.

This story library was proof that Portal Software could deliver real value even though it was a start-up. Every time I got a lead, I would do background research in preparation for my first meeting. Then I would review my story library and decide which stories were most relevant based on factors such as industry, size, geography, potential business objectives, and challenges. After asking a set of robust discovery questions, I would weave the relevant stories into our conversations. My formula was simple:

1. Meet with senior business executives.

2. Take a genuine interest in what they were trying to accomplish.

3. Tell them a story about someone with similar goals who became successful working with us.

It worked like a charm. In fact, it worked so well that when the economy went into a recession and many of my colleagues were laid off, I continued to crush it. I carried a $6 million quota and did $18 million (300 percent of quota). What’s ironic is that I used examples from former sales reps who had not taken advantage of their own success stories to help retain their